The Duchy of Persiceta (or Persiceto) in the Kingdom of the Lombards was created on territory taken from the Byzantine Empire by King Liutprand in 728. It comprised two pagi ("counties"): Monteveglio south of the Via Aemilia and Persiceto to the north. The pagus of Persiceto and the duchy as a whole were named for its chief fortress, the Castrum Persiceta. In this region in 752, King Aistulf granted his brother-in-law Anselm land on which to build a monastery, Nonantola. The dukes of Persiceta were early patrons of Nonantola, and along with the kings gave it vast tracts of land amounting to about 400 square kilometres. [1] Persiceta and Nonantola formed a common bulwark against Byzantine Italy, which Liutprand made no further attempt to occupy. [2]
The Kingdom of the Lombards also known as the Lombard Kingdom; later the Kingdom of (all) Italy, was an early medieval state established by the Lombards, a Germanic people, on the Italian Peninsula in the latter part of the 6th century. The king was traditionally elected by the highest-ranking aristocrats, the dukes, as several attempts to establish a hereditary dynasty failed. The kingdom was subdivided into a varying number of duchies, ruled by semi-autonomous dukes, which were in turn subdivided into gastaldates at the municipal level. The capital of the kingdom and the center of its political life was Pavia in the modern northern Italian region of Lombardy.
The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire and Byzantium, was the continuation of the Roman Empire in its eastern provinces during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinople. It survived the fragmentation and fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD and continued to exist for an additional thousand years until it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. During most of its existence, the empire was the most powerful economic, cultural, and military force in Europe. Both the terms "Byzantine Empire" and "Eastern Roman Empire" are historiographical exonyms created after the end of the realm; its citizens continued to refer to their empire simply as the Roman Empire, or Romania (Ῥωμανία), and to themselves as "Romans".
Liutprand was the King of the Lombards from 712 to 744 and is chiefly remembered for his Donation of Sutri, in 728, and his long reign, which brought him into a series of conflicts, mostly successful, with most of Italy. He is often regarded as the most successful Lombard monarch, notable for the Donation of Sutri, which was the first accolade of sovereign territory to the Papacy.
The earliest recorded duke was a Friulian, Ursus I, around 750. His son John was duke between 772 and 776, during which period the Franks conquered the kingdom. John's son, Ursus II, was sent as a child to Nonantola, tonsured as a monk and in 789 gave all his earthly goods to the monastery his father had already well endowed. This land was later leased back to the townsfolk and serves as the basis for the Partecipanza, a form of agricultural cooperative. Under the Franks the duchy became a pagus ruled by a gastald, eventually attached to Modena and ultimately, in 908, to Bologna. [3]
The Siege or Battle of Pavia was fought in 773–774 in northern Italy, near Ticinum, and resulted in the victory of the Franks under Charlemagne against the Lombards under king Desiderius.
An agricultural cooperative, also known as a farmers' co-op, is a cooperative where farmers pool their resources in certain areas of activity. A broad typology of agricultural cooperatives distinguishes between 'agricultural service cooperatives', which provide various services to their individually farming members, and 'agricultural production cooperatives', where production resources are pooled and members farm jointly. Examples of agricultural production cooperatives include collective farms in former socialist countries, the kibbutzim in Israel, collectively governed community shared agriculture, Longo Mai co-operatives and Nicaraguan production co-operatives.
A gastald was a Lombard official in charge of some portion of the royal demesne with civil, martial, and judicial powers. By the Edictum Rothari of 643, the gastalds were given the civil authority in the cities and the reeves the like authority in the countryside. Under the Lombard dominion, territories were delimited by giudicati or "judgments" among the several gastalds. From the immediate region of Parma and of Piacenza, numerous such giudicati survive, which cover the range of Lombard rule. The documents follow the same formalized structure, of which one between the gastald Daghiberto and the gastald Immo was adjudged by Adaloald, at Ticino, November 615.
